Speaker Sam Rayburn Quotes

Democratic congressman Sam Rayburn of Texas—who had been a longtime Speaker of the House and was a close friend of Harry Truman’s—summed up the whole controversy before a group of fellow Texas politicians. “All your high-flown political vocabulary boils down to just three words,” Rayburn said. “Nigger, nigger, nigger!

The author describes Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn as "seldom at ease without a gavel in his hand.

No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South.